Symbiotic Reviews

The Untamed

Director: Amat Escalante

Year of release: 2017

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Spanish filmmaker Amat Escalante's The Untamed is a movie about lust, libido, and the tenuous line between pleasure and pain. It's also, incidentally, a movie about just how far some people are willing to go in pursuit of phallus-tentacled copulation. A fascinating, ambiguous genre mashup that crosses social-realist melodrama with bizarre alien invasion thriller, The Untamed could be considered a slinky, sexy time if not for the mood of portentous dread buzzing throughout. Basically, this isn't your average phallic tentacle romance.

The story centers around bored housewife Alejandra (Ruth Ramos), her homophobic husband Angel (Jesús Meza), Alejandra's openly gay brother, Fabian (Eden Villavicencio), and a mysterious drifter named Veronica (Simone Bucio), who pops up occasionally to disrupt the narrative. Escalante unfurls a seemingly straight forward love triangle of sorts, which is interrupted by the arrival of an alien creature (which looks like a multi-tentacled demonic worm crossed with a fleshy spider) hidden deep inside a remote cabin in the woods. Aesthetically, Escalante favors slow zooms, long-held closeups of the faces of the non-professional cast, and methodical camera movements. Like his previous film; the deeply harrowing drug cartel drama, Heli, The Untamed is a work of rigorous minimalism which builds an atmosphere of queasy dread. Laced with a discordant score and elliptical narrative structure, the film at times feels like a mix of Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, but its greatest strength lies in its refusal to make the alien creature into a binary metaphor.

Though there are a lot of issues at play here--sexual dissatisfaction, repression, homophobia, addiction, misogyny--The Untamed never simplifies things into a tidy allegory. Instead, as different characters encounter the alien, the creature takes on different meanings. For some, it fills a sexual void. For others, it overtakes their base impulses and violently destroys them. Therefore, the film could be about pure desire; sexual or otherwise, commenting on the risks some are willing to take in order to break free from the soul-crushing monotony of daily life. Or it could simply be a melodrama about desperate lovers and the penis-shaped giver of pleasure that comes between them. Either way, The Untamed is an audacious trip into elusive button-pushing; calling into question our primal desires and the lengths we will go in order to feel something, even if that something involves slimy, calamari-adjacent kink.